What I learned talking to the people at DOJO AI about "Product Engineer"

A conversation and the team's public statements that gave this investigation its first signal.

When I started digging into what "Product Engineer" actually means, I didn't want to stop at job postings and LinkedIn posts.

Postings tell you what a company wrote down. They don't tell you what the people at that company actually look for when they talk about the work.

So I went further: I talked directly with people at a company that uses the title heavily — DOJO AI, a fast-growing AI marketing platform — and treated those conversations as a source: a conversation with the people who define this role for a living.

One of the first conversations was with someone on their team. Early on, he said something that turned out to be the most useful data point of the whole exchange:

Field Notes Evidence & context

I'd already read what DOJO's own team had been publicly writing about hiring, so I recognized the line immediately — it's almost verbatim what their own leadership has been saying in public.

One team member had posted about searching for someone "part engineer, part product person, part designer," comparing it to finding a specific Pokémon in the wild, because most people are strong in one of those dimensions and merely tolerate the other two.

Field Notes Evidence & context

Another post used Mario Kart as the metaphor: most characters are specialists — heavy and fast, or light and nimble — but the hire they wanted was more like Mario, "not the best at anything" but "reasonably strong across every stat."